Author, Politician. He was sometimes called "The Spanish Zola" because his early, realistic novels dealt with the poor and oppressed in his native Valencia. Later he turned to writing best sellers that brought him international fame, though at the expense of his literary reputation. Most popular were the bullfighting story "Blood and Sand" (1909) and the World War I sagas "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1916) and "Mare Nostrum" (1918). All were made into films, "Blood and Sand" several times. Blasco Ibáñez came from a modest Aragonese family. An ardent anti-monarchist, he abandoned law studies to disseminate his political views through speeches and pamphlets. He was arrested several times for his activities. From 1894 to 1896 he published the radical republican newspaper "El Pueblo"; it was finally banned by the government and the author was imprisoned for a year. In 1898 Blasco Ibáñez was elected by a landslide to the Spanish Parliament as a deputy from Valencia, and this spared him further persecution. During this time he began his literary career in earnest and won admiration for his naturalistic, liberal-minded fiction. This includes the novels "The Mayflower" (1895), "The Cabin" (1898), "Reeds and Mud" (1902), and "The Shadow of the Cathedral" (1903), and the short story collections "Tales from Valencia" (1893) and "The Condemned Woman" (1896). Disillusioned by his stint in Parliament, Blasco Ibáñez withdrew from politics in 1907 and moved to Argentina, where he lost a lot of money attempting to create two agricultural colonies. At the start of World War I he finally settled as a self-exile in Menton, France, and devoted himself fully to writing. In 1917 he financed, wrote, and co-directed the earliest screen version of "Blood and Sand", his only venture into cinema; after that he was content to sell the lucrative movie rights to his books. Following his death his remains were returned to Valencia, as he had requested. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)